When I arrived home, I threw down my gym bag and went straight to find my father. In those days, he gave lectures a few times a week and then came home. I knew he missed my mother—we all did—who seemed to be working all the time. My siblings were still in the middle of their school day and would return to a full meal, which my father and I cooked together. Often we made simple meals of potatoes fried in oil with chilies and tomatoes. It was my job to bake the bread. We would set a plate aside for my mother and then do the clean-up together. I found my father alone at the living room window, his tall silhouette gray and slightly hunched as he stared into the pane as though into a giant television screen. He held a pair of binoculars to his eyes, and I thought of men on safari in the depths of Africa; but he was just my father standing several floors up above the teeming streets of Peshawar.
“Where did you get those binoculars, Baba?”
When he turned to me, his big white smile in the dim light almost knocked me over. No matter where he was, my father lived as if he were born for some great purpose. He loved life, and it rushed out from his whole body as though he were made of light—even there.
“I borrowed them from a friend. I wanted to get a closer look at things. Tomorrow, I have to give them back.”
“Everything here is all the same, Baba. I bet I could walk every street and see all the same men doing all the same things.”
My father put away his smile and looked at me—hard.
“Well, well, well. I was wondering when the weightlifting would let you down.”
He roared, laughing at his own joke. He stepped away from the grimy window, wiped off, and handed me the binoculars.
I held the heavy glasses to my eyes and directed the lenses down into the crowded street. It was like scanning the surface of a slow-moving river: vessels sailed along with the current, men walked the wide banks. It was all a blur. I fingered the dial as my father directed and focused the view, zeroing in on the oblivious world below. There was something hysterical about seeing close up the very terrain I’d crossed just minutes before. I stood back and laughed, looking over to my father in astonishment. I’d only once felt such power before—when I’d turned on a television for the first time. I’d pressed the button again and again—turning the world on and off at the whim of my index finger.
My father grinned wide and motioned for me to take another look through the binoculars, and I did. Back and forth, I slowly swept my polished gaze over the paved scene—moving figures, moving things. I felt slightly predatory, tightening the glass on a parade of the absent-minded; people traversed streets as if in a trance, or sat in cars and on rickshaws, bent over motorbikes and hung off buses, expressionless, awake but sleeping—alive but dead.
My father whispered into my ear. He might as well have been reading a page ripped from my mind:
“Zombies.”
The horde moved at a snail’s pace. A few people stood still on the sidewalk, checking pockets, waiting for buses, or deep in conversation with companions—the drama of lives playing out. I watched two men arguing under an awning across the way, arms gesticulating. Then, as I shifted to farther along the road, a boy reached out and swiftly pilfered a mango off a cart. I watched him do it and giggled. Once the mango was in his hand, he tossed it like a ball several feet into the waiting hands of a wily cohort standing some distance away, who shoved the fruit fast into a tattered satchel. They stole at least six pieces that way, lobbing bright fruit through the air in blink-of-an-eye maneuvers so well practiced that no one but I, watching as though up in a cloud, even noticed their crime.
Then I zoomed in further and scanned up the boulevard. From a fume-choked distance I watched as a group of boys moved down the street, racing toward my building with the current of traffic, shifting this way and that through the breaks between vehicles. I didn’t have to look hard to know—they were all members of my old fighting crew. Just watching them, I could hear their sounds: high-pitched shouts, calling back and forth to one another over the din of engines and horns as they veered out like wasps speeding around cars and trucks. They had complete command of the road; and watching them race forward in that scattering swarm without a trace of hesitation, I could see they knew it. It was so strange to observe them that way, while standing in the quiet of my living room. Still, watching as they moved up the asphalt river and into the urban blur, I imagined seeing myself riding among them, always at the front of the pack. We’d all traveled the lengths of the city like warriors, and acted on impulse alone—always on the move. Despite the blood and pain of our brawls, I suddenly missed that gang, though I couldn’t remember a single name to go with those beat-up faces racing up the boulevard. I was sure that word had gotten around that I was lifting weights. No boy in Peshawar, no matter how brazen, would ever dare to challenge me again. Those days were over and I knew it. I handed the binoculars back to my father.
“I wonder if this is what Allah feels like, watching us, Baba.”
“Allah doesn’t watch, so much as know. He has no need for binoculars.”
“I would like to know what he wants me to do.”
“Whatever it is, Genghis, you’re already doing it.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
My father had the binoculars back up to his eyes, while he glassed the scene below.
“Start tomorrow by looking around. You might notice a fork in the road. I see them all the time myself.”
“A fork?”
“Yes. Open your eyes. Sometimes you have to go in the wrong direction to find the right one.”
*
Less than a week later, it was angry weather. Sirens and horns blared. People shouted in the streets. Once or twice, I thought I heard a gunshot, or maybe an engine had backfired—hard to tell. I walked the concrete paths outside the sports complex through blinding sunlight. It felt as though the sky was on fire. Clouds were a dream, coolness an impossible wish. I held my gym bag over one shoulder, full canteen swinging into my thigh. I waited in a pool of feeble tree shade for Taimur to meet me after his classes. Sitting on a low cinder-block wall, taking small sips of the lukewarm water in my bottle, I kept wiping drops of sweat from my brow. Boys moved up the walkway and past me, casting glances at my rock-hard limbs—no one ever seemed to look me in the eye anymore.
The hard cement under me chafed against my legs, and I had to shift my weight again and again. I waited for my brother the way a pedestrian waits for a light to change, and for what seemed like hours. I studied the structure at the opposite end of the quad. Tall and painted pale orange, it dwarfed the weight facility. People kept filtering inside in small, exuberant groups. Every time the big front doors flew open, the erratic sound of a game in full swing was unmistakable, but I had to strain to make out the shifting tensions—high cheers, low groans. When the doors shut, the noise ceased, leaving me in the tedium of buzzing heat.
Tired of killing time, I got up from the wall and wandered across the quadrangle—if a game was on, I wanted to see it. I peered through the glass doors, pressing my hands against the cool surface. The glass seemed to vibrate from within, as though whatever game was being played had reached its climax. A tall man came up behind me and pulled open the door. I stepped into the open threshold as he moved past me. He had a racquet bag slung over his shoulder and must have been well over six feet tall. His body was lean, and he moved with a lithe agility I’d not seen before. Perhaps sensing me watching him, he looked back, stopped, and smiled in a way that invited me all the way in. I shadowed him down a long, silent corridor and into the stands. The whole world of heat and monotony outside simply vanished. He went well ahead of me, descending concrete steps two at a time to join his group in the front row. Shuffling along the packed tiered benches, I stared down at a big glass playing box. The air was soft and the light was dim, and I felt that I could breathe again. I waited in my seat for the next match to begin.
It was so unexpected—being there at all. Two men dressed in vibrant athletic gea
r stood in the lit-up box as though at the center of an ice cube. All around them in the crowded dark void, a silent, expectant energy rippled out. For a while there was no sound. The two players stood and spun a racquet like a top to decide who would make the first serve. It rattled when it hit the ground. A few people called out from the stands. I’d seen squash played once before on the television set with the sound off. Next to cricket, it was the most popular sport in Pakistan, but I didn’t know a thing about it except that it was played against four walls.
The first player leveled his serve hard. I’ll never forget the hollow sound of him grunting, then the loud thud as the smacked rubber ball ricocheted, propelling the players into a wild rally. The men raced around the box. Jumping. Diving. Running. Shoes squeaked against the polished plank floor. From the initial hit, I was hooked—the ensuing controlled chaos of motion, the ball darting like a bullet. In the thick of that first rally, the players never stopped moving. I didn’t care who won. I just watched— stunned—as though my whole world had shifted on its axis in the blink of an eye.
“What are you doing in here?”
Taimur’s low, paternal voice startled me, and I looked up slightly dazed. I’d been following the wild trajectory of that rubber ball in a strange frenetic trance. Every time it hit the wall, I felt the beat land in my heart. My tall, broad-shouldered brother had a way of appearing disheveled when he was confused, though his hair was perfectly combed. I smiled—big and wide.
“What do you think of squash, Taimur? It’s beautiful.”
Taimur squeezed in next to me, put his schoolbag on the floor, his gym bag in his lap, and watched the match. We sat side by side a long time, saying nothing—neither one of us making a move to leave. Several times, I could feel his eyes shift to me and then back to the pounding rhythm of the game. It was hard to tell if he was as riveted as I was. He simply observed his surroundings, the loud, jubilant pack of spectators all around us, their gazes fixed to that bright white box, to the players moving in a blur. When the audience erupted after a particularly long back-and-forth, he showed no reaction. Several times, I shrieked next to him, and I thought I heard him snigger. We should have been lifting weights. I kept waiting for him to tap me on the arm and grab his bags—maybe he knew he’d have to drag me out of my seat. The longer we sat there together, the more confident I became that I wasn’t ever going back to the weight room. At last, he breathed out as if he’d made up his mind about something. Taimur sometimes spoke in a definite language of sighs, gestures, and grunts. He took his gym bag from his lap and dumped it on the floor, kicking it back behind his feet. He sat back, folding his arms over his chest, nodding. Then he turned to me and whispered in my ear.
“I like it, Genghis.”
“I love it, Taimur.”
“We’re going to need racquets.”
When I found Baba that evening, he was sitting in the dim glow of a reading lamp, sewing up a tear in his kameez. A thick cast of duct tape wrapped about the lamp’s joint, to keep it together, as if it had a broken appendage. I don’t know where he’d found the tape, but lately he’d been using it to fix everything: wobbly table legs, the frayed spines on his books, a fan blade, a toothbrush, and the fractured lamp. My father had large square hands, but his long fingers were nimble with the thread. I watched him with a needle held between his finger and thumb, making stitches, up and down, deftly caressing the air, no doubt to music playing in his head. He was performing a domestic task for which he would have been taunted anywhere outside our home. In a moment, he looked over, eyes landing on me with a half-grin. For several beats, we said nothing to each other. I might as well have been gone on a long trip—in a way, I had.
“Well, here you are, Genghis Khan, back from an adventure at last. Am I right? I can see it in your eyes: you’ve trapped stars in them.”
I hadn’t stopped smiling since leaving the sports complex at the end of the match. “I found a fork, Baba. Just as you said to.”
“Aha! I knew it. You’ve always been a very good listener. Let me guess: it wasn’t in the weightlifting room.”
“No, it was inside a giant glass cube.”
When I told my father about discovering the game, describing its fast-paced lure, he listened and watched me intently. After a few minutes, he got up from his chair, and turned off the crippled lamp. My mother had taken a position as the principal of a school near Darra Adam Khel and wasn’t home. Five days a week, after we had all kneeled together to recite our morning fajr prayers and share a quick morning meal, she would leave for her new job, only returning tired and hungry in the evening. In her absence the rest of the family shared in the household responsibilities, like a cleaning squad with my father acting as the captain. Seeing their Baba participating in menial chores would have been an abhorrent sight to most Pashtun children, but to us it was a gift. I loved coming home and finding him there. Often we would sit together sipping tea and wait for my mother and the rest of the children to return.
Wordlessly, we went out the door, moved down the flights of stairs in semi-darkness, and stepped out into the loud city to flag down a rickshaw. My father didn’t seem to think much at all about the fact that I wanted to give up weightlifting and take up squash. Resolute as ever, he simply accepted my decision without question, just as more than eight years before he’d accepted the incineration of my dresses in the cooking pit. Later, when my mother balked at the idea of me playing squash instead of going back to school, he talked her out of her trepidation. She had long hoped that, like my sister, I would follow in her footsteps and pursue a degree and an eventual career in education. Having a daughter who played a professional sport had never occurred to her. She had never even come across a female athlete. In our part of the world, they simply didn’t exist. More than once, I heard them debating my fate in heated whispers late into the night. Once, I heard my father say: “Maria isn’t like other girls. She isn’t Ayesha, and she isn’t you.” In the end, my mother agreed.
Somehow, I knew my father would have been thinking of his sister, as he listened to me rattle on about the exhilarating squash game—he thought of her often when we talked about my plans. Sometimes, when he looked at me, he saw her and said so. Other times, he saw her and said very little, as he had that afternoon. She and I were so alike—in our look, in our aggressive manner, hot-tempered—but we wouldn’t share the same tragic fate. When we sat back in the rickshaw, my father took my hand a moment and kissed the top of my head. He whispered something into the wind as the driver steered away from the curb and out into the traffic, but I never heard what it was.
One building over from the weightlifting facility, the door opened to a sea of polished tiles spread over the deserted lobby. I’d been there just hours before, but now the silence that greeted us in the bright artificial light was eerie. I assumed it would be like the last time: we’d find a coach, write down my name, and sign me up. A man sat behind a desk off to one side and we made our way over to him. He was clean-shaven and smelled of orange peel. His hands were wide and rough-looking, and when he looked up, we recognized each other. He was the tall man with the racquet bag whom I’d followed that afternoon.
My father spoke to him in hushed tones for a few minutes while I walked around, already feeling sure of my surroundings. Along the walls, I scanned framed pictures of players holding up trophies. Beaming grins, placards engraved with dates and the names of cities around the world—London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Philadelphia, New York. I could hear the thudding of people playing in the glass boxes. It sounded as though deep within the guts of the huge building there was a great honeycomb of those playing cubes. An intoxicating energy coursed like a storm brewing, while I stood at its periphery, in the same way I waited poised on the roadway for the jingle bus, ready to jump into the fray. I’d never wanted to do anything the way I wanted to play squash. Just the idea of holding a racquet, hitting the ball against those white walls, made my whole body seem to take flight inside itself.
; My father called me back to the desk and the man looked me over, not appraising, just curious. He asked me if I truly had the desire to learn the game and I nodded. He pulled open a drawer and found a form and pen, pushing them over. The man raised a finger as I signed at the bottom. He looked at me. “And now we just need your birth certificate.”
At once the blood rushed from my head, and I felt sick to my stomach. I looked at my father and could tell he didn’t want to explain a thing—not there, not then. As we stood in utter silence, I felt myself traveling further and further away from the dream I’d only just caught in the palm of my hand. All I had was my identity card, and I heard my father say we would have to go home for the birth record. The man nodded and said it would do for the time being. Still, birth certificate or not, there was no going back. Quickly, with the seconds ticking away like a detonator in my heart, I rummaged through my mind for an excuse, a reason why I could not provide the documentation that would rat me out. Even in profile I could see the strain in my father’s face, the veins pulsing in his neck. He never blinked. I knew he was doing the same thing, looking for a way around the red tape—around telling the truth. I was sure that he wanted to leave, right then, without offering a single word as to why.
I don’t know what possessed me to take command of that moment, but I did. Gently, I touched my father’s arm and nodded. We looked at each other in a profound way, eyes locked—and he knew what I wanted him to do.
“Do you let girls play? My daughter here would like to know.”
A Different Kind of Daughter Page 17
